Moborate

Now that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has unfortunately allegedly indefinitely deferred its proposed ban on scurrilous words and phrases such as 'fingerfood', 'harder', 'deeper', 'Randhwa' [widower] and 'Carrom board', I believe it is time to step back, take a deep breath and re-evaluate, without all the deafening media hysteria, the fine, fine work being carried out by the telecom regulator. And yes, appreciate its commitment to promoting the country's progress in spheres that, in all honesty, is not its responsibility but which it takes on purely as a matter of conscientious citizenship. It is time for those of us whose voices were drowned out by the cacophony of knee-jerk anarchic reactionary-ism to step forward and bring a semblance of thoughtfulness back to public discourse. In this regard, I have taken the liberty of writing an open letter of appreciation to PTA, which I hope those amongst you who were equally troub...

Run for your lives, art vultures! Picasso 's still alive, he's cloned himself into a small army, and all of them are mighty pissed at how much money you've been making off them! From Dawn 's ' International Pages ': Page 11 of Dawn today In case you have difficulty reading from the image, the story - about a cache of hitherto unknown works by the master painter discovered at an electrician's home - is headlined "Horde of Picassos discovered in Paris." Shall we give this the "I Work for an English Paper But Find the Language Really Confusing" Award in today's Bizarre Newspaper Headline Contest ?

First off, a BIG congratulations to the Pakistan Women's Cricket Team for bringing in Pakistan's first (and perhaps only) gold in the ongoing Asian games . One hopes the stuffed shirts at the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) and the Sports Ministry will understand the irony of this achievement and finally begin to give sportswomen  their due. Nida Rashid scored 51 not out and took 4 wickets (Photo: AP/Dawn) In lean times such as these for the Pakistani media, I had to scrounge around for unread material from old newspapers. It is, after all, Eid ul Azha and the only news reports these last two days seem to be about how people are 'enjoying' themselves, which apparently involves women being chained to kitchen stoves, men eating like pigs and children bawling their eyes out because mummy was cooking their favourite pet and daddy was eating it. In any case, came across this unintentionally funny piece from Dawn 's sports pages on November 17, about how our squash player...

As if to prove that the folks at the cynicocratical Café Pyala are also perfectly capable of jumping up and down and screaming Like, OMG! Like, how exciting! , the discovery of the day award goes to Save the Words , a site devoted to the preservation of some of English’s most eccentric children. Its raison d’être is summarized thus: "Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English Language. Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved and unwanted. Today, 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7000 words. You can change all that. Help save the words! If not for yourself, then for generations yet to come. Now, you may ask, “What have future generations done for us lately?” Well, not much. But one day they’ll be grateful. You never know, one day they might even have a word or two to say about you. Help spread the word." Some of you writers/reporters/journalists out there might wonder whether emb...